Business-to-business (B2B) marketing organizations spend billions of dollars every year on customer acquisition, also referred to as demand generation. While these companies may know how many new leads they are generating, they typically have no way of determining how many of those leads actually generate revenue. Therefore, they have no way to calculate their true return on investment (ROI).
With significant increases over the last several years in online research for buyers and online marketing spend for B2B organizations, the challenge becomes even more complex. Today, marketing organizations are interested in measuring ROI across both online and offline channels, simultaneously, and in a way that allows comparison of results at every stage of the marketing and sales lifecycle across all types of campaigns. Without the ability to compare the success of different programs, marketing organizations cannot improve their portfolio of marketing investments or continue to innovate to increase business performance.
Historically, in many organizations, a barrier exists between sales and marketing. The sales team typically believes that the marketing department is sending them unqualified leads. The marketing department believes the sales team is not focusing on qualification of marketing-sourced leads, assuming they are inferior to sales-generated leads. Conventional systems fail to provide either department with the analysis tools needed to properly evaluate leads and determine which marketing campaigns are most effective.
In addition, conventional customer relationship management (CRM) systems generally fail to measure the effectiveness of multiple campaigns in influencing customer behavior. One closed deal could possibly have a large number of different campaigns associated with it, depending on the number of campaigns associated with each contact and the total number of unique contacts (both decision makers and influencers) on the account. If several events (or “touches”) take place in which the customer is exposed to a marketing campaign or series of campaigns, conventional systems fail to provide any meaningful way to determine which such events (or combinations of events) tend to be most effective for various types of customers. In particular, many existing systems perform analysis at the level of individual contacts rather than at the level of an account; thus, when several contacts (persons) are associated with an account, these existing systems fail to perform useful analysis as to the effectiveness of multiple contact points in terms of their ability to encourage customers to make purchases. Also, existing systems often fail to provide any mechanism for measuring the effectiveness of first touch, last touch, or multi-touch campaigns.
Accordingly, existing systems do not provide a complete picture of the effectiveness of marketing operations. In particular, such systems often fail to measure their effectiveness from the first impression to closed deal for both online and offline campaigns across all channels, tactics, offers and formats in a single system.
What is needed is a system and method that breaks down barriers between sales and marketing divisions of a company by delivering useful reports that chart the effectiveness of efforts across all stages of the marketing and sales process.
What is further needed is a system and method that analyzes the effect of multiple events and/or campaigns on customer behavior, so as to more accurately gauge the effectiveness of such multiple events and/or campaigns in bringing in customers.
What is further needed is a system and method that analyzes marketing efforts at an account level, so as to properly analyze the actions of multiple contact points associated with a single account.